---
title: 'Program Manager - Growth & Profitability at Zipline'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-growth-profitability-zipline-south-san-francisco-california-esxdv9ws5em3'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Program Manager - Growth & Profitability at Zipline 

- **Company:** Zipline 
- **Location:** South San Francisco California, United States
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://www.zipline.com/open-roles/7911795003?gh_jid=7911795003

## Job description

## About Zipline

Zipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products.

Our customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.

Our system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.

We operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.

The Opportunity

Zipline has spent the last decade proving autonomous delivery can be safe, reliable, and life-changing at global scale. We are now focused on scaling that network into the world's first high growth, profitable autonomous delivery business.

The number of partners offering delivery through Zipline grew 13x in the first half of 2026. The next challenge is to make that growth compound: increasing customer demand and love, helping partners succeed, and demonstrating economics that improve with scale. That is the charter of Zipline’s Growth & Profitability program.

This program brings together marketplace strategy, network optimization, product, sales, and marketing to ensure that everything connects with hardware engineering, flight software, and operations. We need a deeply experienced program leader to integrate the seams so it all adds up to efficient business results.

In this role you will partner directly with the executive accountable for commercial cross-organizational program decisions, the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI).

## What you’ll do

- Set the program outcomes and tradeoffs. With the DRI, define a small set of measures linking growth, customer and partner adoption, capacity, service quality, utilization, unit economics, and margin.
- Own cross-program integration. Translate priorities in both directions; and expose dependencies, resource conflicts, ownership gaps, and organizational barriers.
- Serve as the DRI’s field deputy. Make day-to-day cross-functional calls within the delegated mandate, drive decisions to closure, and bring the DRI well-framed choices when their judgment or authority is required.
- Lead at the seams. Drive outcomes no function can deliver alone and help define steady-state ownership and handoff timeliness
- Create the program’s source of truth and communication system. Keep metrics, milestones, decisions, risks, and cross-team asks current; use concise updates and operating reviews to surface issues while the company still has good choices.
- Stay close to operating reality. Spend time with metro teams, operators, partners, and customers; test headquarters assumptions against field evidence and adapt the plan quickly.

What Great Looks Like

- Customer experience, community love, customer growth, repeat usage, partner outcomes, capacity utilization, and unit economics improve together.
- Metro launches, partner activations, and operational changes move faster and shift from one-off heroics to a repeatable operating model.
- You ensure decisions close faster because leaders share a current view of priorities, ownership, tradeoffs, dependencies, and risk; avoidable surprises are rare.
- The DRI focuses on decisions that need their authority, while functional leaders feel accelerated by you—not displaced or burdened by process.

## What You’ll Bring

- 12+ years in progressively senior operating, program, GM, product, strategy-and-operations, transformation, or executive-office roles, with a record of personally leading consequential cross-company work to measurable commercial or operating results.
- Credibility with executives and functional leaders: you can influence difficult decisions without reporting-line authority and handle sensitive business and organizational context with judgment.
- Strong P&L judgment across growth, customer behavior, partner economics, pricing, capacity, utilization, and unit economics.
- The range to move from long-term strategy to quantitative detail and frontline execution, and the communication skill to turn fragmented context into crisp decisions, plans, and updates.
- Experience building lightweight operating mechanisms that create ownership, speed, and follow-through without bureaucracy.
- High agency and low ego: you have sufficient fluency across various domains, will challenge assumptions with first-principles reasoning, change your mind when the evidence is better, and stay accountable through the outcome.
- Experience in one of multi-sided marketplaces, logistics, delivery, mobility, aviation, infrastructure, or other hardware-enabled, regulated, or operations-intensive networks.

What Else You Need to know

This is an in-person role based at Zipline’s South San Francisco headquarters. It requires regular travel to operating metros and partner locations to stay close to customers, teams, launches, and operating reality.

The starting cash range for this role is $200,000-$300,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more.

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply! Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

## About Zipline 

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zipline is an American robotics company that operates the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery service, transporting medical supplies, food, and retail goods across multiple continents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage startup)
- **Headquarters**: South San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: March 2014
- **Founders**: Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Keenan Wyrobek, Ryan Oksenhorn, William Hetzler

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Logistics / Drone delivery
- **Target customers**: B2B (healthcare systems, governments, retailers like Walmart and Chipotle) and B2C (home delivery via the Zipline app)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Build the first logistics system that serves all people equally” – initially focused on saving lives by delivering blood and medicine to remote communities, now expanded to instant urban delivery.

## Products & Services
- **Platform 1 (P1)**: Long-range, rural delivery drone. Carries up to 4 lbs, roundtrip range 120+ miles, cruise speed 60 mph. Uses parachute delivery. Designed for enterprise, government, and healthcare supply chains.
- **Platform 2 (P2)**: Urban/suburban home delivery drone. Carries up to 8 lbs, service radius 10 miles (or 24 miles one way), cruise speed 70 mph. Delivers via a tether from up to 300 ft, allowing contactless drop-off. Launched in 2025 and used for food, retail, and health products.
- **Zipping Points**: Modular ground stations that allow businesses to load orders onto drones without specialized equipment.
- **FlightIQ**: Advanced onboard autonomy and perception suite for safe navigation and delivery.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: 2 million commercial deliveries completed (as of January 2026) and 130 million autonomous miles flown.[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not disclosed in available sources. Key partners include Walmart, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Crumbl, Blaze Pizza, Wendy’s, and many other restaurant brands. In healthcare, works with more than 5,000 hospitals and health centers.
- **Growth Signals**: Expanded into urban home delivery in 2025 (P2) with service in Pea Ridge, Arkansas and 20+ communities in Dallas-Fort Worth. Obtained FAA authorization for beyond visual line of sight operations. Reports 56% decrease in maternal mortality and 66% decrease in missed malaria treatments in served regions.[zipline-fact-sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Autonomous drone fleet**: One of the world’s largest commercial deployments of autonomous robots, with custom software running on Nvidia chips.
- **FAA approval**: All operations and aircraft are FAA-approved, including pioneering use of Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM).
- **Quieter than road vehicles**: Drones hover high and descend on a tether, generating noise lower than common neighborhood sounds.
- **Extensive testing**: One of the largest aviation testing campaigns, with operations in rain, wind, and storms.
- **Integrated logistics platform**: Beyond drones, Zipline provides warehousing, inventory management, cold chain storage, and fulfillment software.

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling the Platform 2 urban delivery network across the U.S., particularly through partnerships with major retailers and restaurants.
- Deepening healthcare impact by expanding into new countries and product categories (prescriptions, groceries, convenience items).
- Continuing to reduce delivery times and environmental footprint (0 emissions per delivery, compared to automotive delivery).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture values**: Ownership & Accountability, Direct Feedback & Communication, Continuous Improvement, Customer Obsession, Servant Leadership (as stated on careers page). Emphasis on “Make it matter” and mission-driven work.[careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
- **Work environment**: Headquartered in South San Francisco with hardware and software teams. The company assembles its drones in America. Likely on-site given the hardware focus; remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated.
- **Impact**: Opportunity to work on life-saving technology (60,000+ lives saved) and shape the future of instant logistics.
- **Engineering culture**: Build and iterate on autonomous systems, airspace deconfliction, and large-scale robotics deployments.

## Sources
1. [Zipline Careers](https://www.zipline.com/careers)
2. [Zipline Homepage](https://www.zipline.com/)
3. [About Zipline](https://www.zipline.com/about)
4. [Zipline Fact Sheet](https://www.zipline.com/about/zipline-fact-sheet)
5. [Wikipedia - Zipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company))
6. [Greenhouse Careers Page](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/flyzipline)

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